Adults And Children Share Literacy Practices The Case Of Homework

Adults and Children Share
Literacy Practices: The Case
of Homework
Pilar Lacasa
University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain
Amalia Reina
Marı́a Alburquerque
University of Cordova, Cordova, Spain
This article explores how literacy practices when homework is being done give rise to
different interaction experiences among children and their parents. We wished to know
whether such experiences might contribute to the establishment of relationships between
what children learn at home and in school. After reviewing certain issues related to the
concepts of families and schools as communities of practice and to how discursive
practices are woven into them, we focus on a small number of family interactions, in
the course of which a father or mother collaborates on homework with his or her child
by writing various texts. From a methodological perspective, we take an ethnographical
approach, working in an elementary school in Cordova, where we have been participant
observers for 5 years. Two different written texts were proposed as homework in relation
to the health education program. The first was a composition about an out-of-school task,
in which the children shared fruit and conversation with other children in the public park;
the second was a poem about the same topic, written on the basis of the previous texts.
The two tasks were carried out on two different days in the course of the same week.
All the conversations that took place during the homework sessions were transcribed
and analyzed. Our analysis shows three main types of interactive scripts that seem to
be influenced as much as by what the mother or father considers what can be a good
text as by the role that she/he plays when teaching. The final discussion focuses on
how communities of practice can be understood in relation to dynamic processes that
allow relationships to be established between them. From this perspective, homework
becomes an example of how specific practices may help create pathways that enable
participants in both families and school communities to end up sharing goals.
Direct all correspondence to: Dr. Pilar Lacasa, Licenciatura en Psicopedagogı́a, Universidad de Alcalá,
Aulario Marı́a de Guzmán, San Cirilo s/n Alcalá de Henares 28801, Spain. E-mail: p.lacasa@uah.es.
Linguistics and Education 13(1): 39–64. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Copyright © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. ISSN: 0898-5898

40 LACASA, REINA, AND ALBURQUERQUE
The aim of this article is to shed light on how literacy practices, as utilized in the
course of doing homework, give rise to different interaction experiences among
children and their parents. We wished to know whether these experiences could
contribute to the establishment of relationships between what children learn at
home and in school. Many researchers have focused on the interactions that occur
in the classroom when children and teachers approach the construction of knowl-
edge in school, but very little has been said about how children and their families
move in the direction of school knowledge at home. In this research, families and
classrooms are regarded as communities of practice in which learning and under-
standing are assumed to take place through apprenticeship as a context-embedded
process, socially and culturally constituted, and what is to be learned is intimately
boundupwiththeformsviawhichitislearned(Lave,1997).Weapproachtheseset-
tings by focusing on discourse practices as goal-directed actions and as processes
that include interaction as a central component, all of them involving the par-
ticipants, texts, and artifacts employed in implementing the action (Wells, 1993).
Those interactive experiences are defined, among other aspects, for the roles played
by children and adults in the situation, and this role is revealed in the discursive
practices that occur in the situation. At the same time, writing is defined in this
article as a creative process in which the individual constructs new forms of re-
sponse to the world while he or she appropriates the discourses of the community
(Hicks, 1996). After reviewing certain issues related to the concepts of families and
schools as communities of practice and to how discursive practices are woven into
them, we focus on a small number of family interactions, in the course of which a
father or mother collaborates on homework with his or her child by writing various
texts. After reviewing three types of interactional operation centering on home-
work, we argue that school tasks as performed in families are not always the best
way to bridge the gap between school and everyday life. The main question for us
is why some parents engage in very different kinds of “social ecologies” around
homework and what are the larger social ecologies that support those differences.
A possible explanation is that specific families seem to be closely related to a trans-
mission model of teaching and learning, in that they approach culture and school
knowledge as a body of information transmitted verbally from one generation to
the next. By contrast, other people use literacy practices as meaningful activities
carried out in order to achieve specific goals in very different kinds of activities.
LEARNING LITERACY ACROSS COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
This article considers families and schools as communities of practice in the sense
of the concept as introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991, p. 98) who wrote:
The community of practice (. . . ) involves much more than the technical knowledge
skill involved in delivering babies or producing clothes. A community of practice is

SHARING LITERACY PRACTICES 41
a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with
other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is
an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the
interpretative support necessary for making sense of its heritage. Thus, participation
in the cultural practice in which any knowledge exists is an epistemological principle
of learning. The social structure of this practice, its power relations, and its conditions
for legitimacy define possibilities for learning.
Community of practice is of special interest when we think of literacy activities
as involved in both home and school contexts. The idea is related to the assumption
that knowing, thinking, and understanding are generated in the course of practical
experience. Children and adults must learn not just what to do and how to do it, but
also what performance means if the individual is to function and be accepted as
a full member of a community of practice (Lemke, 1997). From that perspective,
literacy has different meanings for people who are involved in different kinds
of activities, and more than one meaning can be considered if these activities
take place both at home and in school. That is, literacy practices are not merely
performances, behaviors, or material process, but rather, are meaningful actions
that have relationships of meaning to one another in terms of a specific cultural
system. Literacy is a cultural and socially constructed process, situationally defined
and redefined within and across various social groups and settings; e.g., families,
classrooms, etc. What counts as literacy in any group is visible in the actions that
its members take, what they orient to, what they hold each other accountable for,
what they accept or reject as preferred responses of others, and how they engage
with, interpret, and construct the text (Castanheira, Crawford, Dixon, & Green,
2001; Moro, 1999).
However, the characteristic meanings of literacy practices, even when they vary
from context to context, need to function as interdependent activities that take
place in different contexts, or at least as distinct instances of the same activity.
What we are suggesting is that there are networks of interdependent practices and
activities that facilitate continuities and trajectories of practice, development, and
learning. In order to establish connections between specific nuclei of the network
of activities, communities can be regarded simultaneously as material ecologies
and semiotic makers of meaning (Lemke, 1997). Considering that making meaning
is much more than an individual process, it may also be a shared way of perceiving
the world, providing guidelines for behavior, and setting standards for judging
behavior and artifacts.
Various authors have referred to what writing means in the classroom context.
School texts are not autonomous, but are dependent on the specific community
in which children and teachers share experiences and senses (Moro, 1999). But
children also learn how to write school texts at home; writing is often an impor-
tant part of homework and children carry it out in the company of mature people,

normally their parents or elder siblings. We cannot suppose that for all those peo-
ple, who probably attended school many years earlier, writing will have the same
meaning as it does for the children or their teacher. Moreover, we need to re-
member that homework does not seem to have the same meaning for all families
(Hoover-Dempsy et al., 2001; McDermott, Goldman, & Varenne, 1984; Olympia,
Sheridan, & Jenson, 1994). In this article, we explore the meaning that families at-
tribute to literacy practices when these are generated within the general framework
of homework.
Focusing on learning literacy in communities of practice, Gutiérrez (1994)
considered that in the “writing process” language and context are socially and
culturally constituted events; from her perspective, patterns of interaction and dis-
course reveal particular social relationships. Literacy learning is situated within
the context of a social milieu and thus, arises from participation in communicative
practices, both proximal and distal (Gutiérrez & Stone, 2000). Focusing on teach-
ing the writing process, she identifies several types of scripts in various classes that
shaped writing pedagogy and were defined by social practice. Scripts are consid-
ered as “resources that members use for interpreting the activity of others and for
guiding their own participation” (Gutiérrez, 1994, p. 340). Differences between
them are related to students opportunities to be involved in classroom participation;
e.g., students in a responsive script are involved in relaxed activity boundaries and
participation structures, in which responses are often solicited and encouraged.
What we really wish to highlight of Gutiérrez’ work is that her notion of script is
a useful construct for understanding how social practices in the classroom relate
to different opportunities for learning, i.e., from her perspective, social practice,
discursive patterns, and learning processes are all interwoven.
SOCIAL INTERACTION, DISCOURSE, AND MAKING MEANING
Bearing in mind that children use writing in multiple contexts, even associated
with school tasks, it is necessary to look for bridges that will enable us to establish
relationships between what children learn about similar texts at home and in school.
We believe that children learn literacy meanings by interacting with other people
and by using discourse as one of the most important devices in school and family
settings. In that context, social relationships and discourse, as tools for mediating
between members of the community of practice, play an important role in the
process of making connections between those meanings as these are involved
in different kinds of practice. We are interested in demonstrating how situations
mediated for discursive practices can contribute to create networks of meaning.
Referring to Bernstein (1996), Moss (2000) refers to the use of knowledge as a
process closely related to coding processes and even to specific kinds of learning.
A sharp distinction is established between horizontal forms of knowledge, which
evolve outside of the seat of formal schooling; and vertical forms of knowledge,

which are specific to school. The main point here is that informal and formal litera-
cies are considered as both horizontal and vertical kinds of discourse. However, let
us focus on how they are defined. The form of discourse usually typified as every-
day, oral, or common-sense knowledge has a group of features: local, segmental,
context-dependent, tacit, multilayered, often contradictory across contexts but not
within context. In contrast, a vertical discourse takes the form of a coherent, ex-
plicit, systematically principled structure, hierarchically organized, or of a series
of specialized languages. Other researchers have analyzed discourse as present in
formal and informal educational scenarios and we will discuss these in order to
show later in which of these the family conversations carried on by children and
adults during homework can be situated. In the following paragraphs, we will fo-
cus on classroom and family talk as situated activities, or in the words of Goffman
(1961), as a “circuit of interdependent actions.”
Focusing now on classroom interaction, we need to refer to Cazden (1988),
whose classic work characterizes classroom discourse as negotiated conventions
and spontaneous improvisations on basic patterns of interaction. When she con-
siders what happens in the classroom, focusing on the teacher’s talk, she analyzes
what happens in several events, especially “sharing time,” and “the structure of
lessons,” both of which are of interest to us. Sharing time gives children the oppor-
tunity to create their own oral text. Furthermore, this may be the only time available
for sharing out-of-school experiences and finally, it is of interest as a context for
the production of narratives of personal experience. In order to explore differences
between home and school discourse, an important aspect for us to consider is that
during sharing it is always the teacher who responds to the children’s stories, often
in an evaluative way. Even more generally, in all speaking and writing assignments,
no matter who the ostensible audience may be, it is usually the teacher’s response
that counts. Cazden, following Mehan (1979), also focuses on the structure of
lessons and she refers to the two most common patterns of classroom discourse
in all grades: (1) The “IRE” or teacher Initiation–student Response–teacher Eval-
uation, and (2) the “TRS” or Topically Related Set, in which the beginning of
each set is signaled by a unique combination of verbal, paralinguistic, and kinesic
behaviors. “In traditional grade school classroom, children are expected to master
not only the content of curriculum material presented by the teacher, but also the
socially appropriate use of communicative resources through which such mastery
is demonstrated.”
Recent researchers have also explored classroom discourse as a specific set-
ting in which adult and children relationships take place. Mercer (1995) refers to
classrooms as just one of a range of real-life settings in which knowledge is jointly
constructed and in which some people help others to develop their understanding.
From his perspective, language is used as a tool, or even a social mode of thinking,
which permits the development of knowledge and understanding. In that context,
the strategies of discourse are explored from both the teacher’s and the learner’s

perspective. Learning can be guided through several kinds of conversations and
focused on in specific ways as present in school, and he recognizes the ways that
teachers’ and learners’ speaking are shaped by cultural traditions and by specific
institutional settings. Considering some techniques used by teachers in Western
schools, among others, he refers to eliciting relevant knowledge from students,
to responding to things that students say and to describing the classroom expe-
riences that teachers share with students. Looking at learners’ opportunities for
active involvement in conversations with their teachers, he suggests that in many
classrooms, occasions for learners to contribute to talk are quite restricted and
that the amount of talk they actually contribute is relatively small. In any case, he
considers that children put into action several strategies to bring their own agendas
and interests into the classroom. Going in depth into this topic, Candela (1998)
explores classroom interactions in order to look for resources that children use to
take the initiative when interacting with their teachers. For example, she shows
how students manage to use and defend alternative versions of the topic of conver-
sation to those proposed by the teacher, even between IRE structure; through this
kind of interventions students change the traditional asymmetry of power present
in many classrooms to control locally the discursive interaction.
But let us explore some of the characteristics of family discourse as, e.g., these
emerge during meals (Blum-Kulka, 1997). According to the authors, children are
active contributors of topics, though they make a smaller number of contributions
than adults in all the different cultural groups that have been observed. Moreover,
they reveal an interesting mechanism that helps explain adult–child relationships
during interactions. For example, a child needs to work conversationally harder
than an adult in order to gain entry to the conversation by initiating a new topic,
and to do so, a child is forced to target his entry into the conversation at specific
recipients. There are also interesting ways in which adults establish more or less
subtle control devices; digressions are one of these, and they are recognizable by
the readaptation of the previous topic on the closure of the digression. By this
means, adults create a distanced perspective that the child is not expected to share.
Controlling by closing a topic of conversation is another device used by adults;
in classroom discourse, it is the teacher who closes by summarizing, evaluating,
paraphrasing, and so on, but during dinner-table conversation, explicitly closing a
topic is relatively infrequent, although it may occur as a process of negotiation or
simply as a means of changing a topic. Another interesting aspect is the role that
parents can play as mediators to facilitate a child’s passage to adult discourse both
directly and indirectly; by using certain supportive strategies, parents encourage
children,firstbyenablingthemtoinitiatetheirowntopicsandthenbyhelpingthem,
by means of questions and comments, to elaborate on topics of their choice. From
timetotime,variouspracticesmaybeintroducedatthedinner-tabletosymbolically
signify the acceptance of the child’s contribution as an equal participant in the
conversation; for children to achieve this stage, they need to be exposed to adult

topics, to feel comfortable about contributing to the topics, and to be given the
chance to direct the talk towards topics of their choice that do not necessarily
directly concern their own lives.
What we wonder now is to what extent the speech type that adults maintain with
children when they carry out homework is similar to that which is traditionally used
in classrooms or if, on the contrary, it resembles that used in families. From our
point of view, if discursive practices, when the children complete homework related
with literacy tasks, are more similar to family scenarios than to school settings,
they might contribute to the establishment of relationships among what children
learn in different contexts.
PARTICIPANTS, SETTINGS, AND DATA COLLECTIONS
We now present some of our work in a public school in Cordova, where we explored
literacy practices when children and their families collaborated at home in school
tasks. About 700 children from 3 to 16 years of age attend this school, which
is situated in a middle- and working-class neighborhood. The members of the
research team frequently visit this school, and at that time, they played the role
of participant observers; one of them was teaching educational psychology at the
University of Cordova, while the others were students in her courses in which
some of the ideas in this article were generated. We have been collaborating with
the same experienced teacher within the framework of a writing workshop for 5
years. This study took place in 1996, the first year of our collaboration. We were
working all year in a fourth-grade class of 13 girls and 9 boys led by their teacher.
Because we focused on people participating in activities, and on looking for
specific and meaningful goals that were woven into social and cultural processes, it
is worth pausing for a moment in order to point out what homework can represent
in Spanish schools and, more concretely, in this class. In general terms, we can
say that although it is not specially recommended by the educational authorities,
many families, teachers, and children believe in its importance. In a previous study
involving children and families in the same class (Reina, Peinado, & Lacasa, 1999),
we analyzed the responses of parents to a written questionnaire regarding their
opinions of the place occupied by homework in the learning process. According
to their answers, 44.83 percent of the families considered that homework was
always important, and 51.72 percent sometimes; large differences existed among
the families as a function of the level of parental education; for example, 55.56
percent of families with the lowest level of education regarded homework as always
very important, while all families with higher education regarded it as important
only sometimes. Moreover, and focusing on the possible meaning of homework
for the teacher, we can point out, as a result of our participant observation in the
same school, that the children take home some of the tasks they have been unable
to finish in school. In this sense, homework could have very different senses for the

childrenandtheirteacher.Wemaysuppose,e.g.,thatwhileforstudentsitrepresents
difficult tasks that they had been unable to finish in school, the teacher may regard
it in terms of a situation that favors individual work, personal responsibility, etc.
In that context, and looking for new ways of doing homework that could help
to establish relationships between what children learn at home and in school in
relation to literacy practices, we thought that it should be important to present
homework as a meaningful task for both the children and their families. The task
proposed as a written homework was related to a program about health education
organized by the teacher. At that time, they were planning a visit to a public park,
where they would join children from other schools to exchange fruit, play together,
and chat. The primary aim of the visit was for the children to learn the importance
of healthy nutritional habits. In the belief that families would share the same goal,
we invited children and adults to write briefly about this experience.
Within this perspective, we approached homework as a cultural activity present
in the life of the family and as a nuclear element around which specific social
interactions were organized. What we wished to explore were the specific patterns
by which these interactions were defined. Because we were interested in exploring
thinking in action, we asked the families to record their conversations. Two differ-
ent written texts were proposed as homework in relation to the health education
program. The first was a composition about an out-of-school task, in which the
children shared fruit and conversation with other children in the public park; the
second was a poem about the same topic, written on the basis of the previous texts.
The two tasks were carried out on two different days in the same week. All the
conversations that took place during the homework sessions were transcribed and
analyzed. Twenty-nine sessions were taped, with the child working with his or her
mother or father. The groups took different amounts of time to complete the tasks,
ranging from 5 to 60 minutes.
All the recordings were transcribed and they make up the fundamental database
of this study. We also worked with the notebooks in which the children had carried
outtheirhomeworkandwheretheyhadwrittentheirnotesoftheexercisesproposed
by the teacher; they were always analyzed in the context of the conversation in
order for an easier interpretation of the content of dialogue in connection with
each moment of the task. In addition to this body of data, we also had the small
questionnaire that each parent had completed, as well as another for each child,
and the documents that the children produced regarding what homework suggested
to them (a fairy tale, a dialogue, and a letter to their teacher).
Our analyses were carried out in several phases. First, the materials were orga-
nized in terms of each family analysis unit and we, therefore, classified the data in
connection with each of these. In order to understand the meaning of their activ-
ities, we elaborated a summary that permitted us to understand the relationships
among what had happened in each session and, at the same time, to interpret it
in terms of the information that families and children had given us about what

Figure 1. An example of the summary’s information.
homework means to them. In Figure 1, we present an example of the information
that we included in this summary; this allowed us to understand the activity from
a macroanalytic perspective.
In the second phase, we performed a microanalysis of each session. We tried to
go beyond the static frames of interpretation that grow out of the researchers’ own
interests and hide participants’ interpretations of the situation. At the same time,
and in order to explore patterns of activity, we avoided the use of units of anal-
ysis that focus on the individual contributions of each participant, isolated from
each other or even detached from the context in which they occurred. In order to
explore patterns of activity across conversations when parents and children col-
laborate on homework, we focused on three main dimensions of the dialogue in

order to define our unit of analysis: (a) the thematic continuity of the conversations
and how children and adults contribute to it, (b) the goals guiding the participants’
activity when they solve the task, (c) interactive support as present in scaffold-
ing strategies used by both children and adults. In the following paragraphs, we
focus on the conversations of both children and their parents while they were
collaborating.
SCHOOL AND FAMILY APPROACHES TO WRITING
The following paragraphs focus on examples of some typical homework situations
that occurred in the course of our study. While we provide an overview of differ-
ent approaches taken by the homework partners, this is not meant to represent a
comprehensive typology of homework interactions. Rather, the categories repre-
sent a general depiction of the types of family interactions that we observed with
a self-selected group of individuals during only one or two of the thousands of
nights in which literacy homework is assigned during a child’s school career in
Spain. Before we proceed further, it is important to provide a caveat. Although we
believe that these conversations tell us part of the story of what happens during
the homework process, it is likely that they tell us just as much about what these
families think ought to be taking place during a homework session. Analyses of
conversations that took place when parents and children were collaborating on
homework showed different approaches to the composition of text. For purposes
of this study, three of these approaches were selected, based on a previous study of
children who were doing their mathematics homework (Lacasa & Baker-Sennet,
1996), certain classroom models of teaching and learning proposed on the basis
of a sociocultural perspective (Olson & Bruner, 1996; Rogoff, 1994; Rogoff, Ma-
tusov, & White, 1996) and another derived from literacy education (Lemke, 1997;
Wells, 1999). These main approaches were the following: (1) We consider that a
mechanical approach when adults and children approached the task ignoring the
meaning of the text and focusing on the physical representation; text seemed to
be a collection of printed marks on paper; i.e., writers did not bring the words
together in a way that expressed an overall meaning that was more than the sum of
its parts, rather than a list of separate, independent words. (2) We considered that
a pedagogical approach existed when adults assumed the role of many teachers
who feel very confident about the knowledge they want to “transmit” to children.
This approach is similar to that proposed by Rogoff et al. (1996), who referred
to an “adult-run model of teaching and learning,” in which the teacher’s job is to
prepare knowledge for transmission and to motivate children to become receptive
to it. This is sometimes supposed to divide up the task into mechanical units and
to “process” the pupils through them, while the children’s role is simply to receive
the information. (3) Finally, a shared construction of knowledge existed when both
adult and child were active, sharing responsibility for dealing with and completing

the task. We will study each of these approaches in some depth by reviewing some
examples.
The Mechanical Approach: Focusing on Formal and Normative Aspects
We consider that parent/child dyads approach the task from this perspective when
they focus especially on formal aspects or on the microstructure of the exercise. In
such cases, using rules to write seems to be more important than actually commu-
nicating with someone, expressing personal feelings, or achieving a specific goal.
By doing so, they seem to assume a predefined criterion according to school norms
of what constitutes a good text. Sometimes this approach is closely linked to the
fact that they need to finish the task as quickly as possible according to the rules
proposed by the teacher. It is difficult for us to know the motivation that underlies
this approach, but it may be related to specific models of understanding school
knowledge. As an example, we focus here on the interaction between Violeta and
her mother, but let us explore the existing ideas of the parents and the girl regarding
homework and school learning. This girl worked on the first day with her mother
and on the second with her father; each adult approached the task from a very dif-
ferent perspective even though both are professionally involved in the educational
system. Violeta’s mother is a kindergarten teacher and her father is an educational
psychologist working in a high school. Describing their ideas about homework,
both agree with it because in their opinion it helps to reinforce what children learn
in school; they also say that children have a very short school timetable.
When they report on the strategies they use to help their child, they say that they
try to help their child to read and understand the task; they also explain that they
sometimes make use of various tools such as books or encyclopedias. In the end,
however, school knowledge seems to be distinct from everyday knowledge in this
family; this at least is our interpretation of their answer to our question regarding
where children learn to read and write: “Children can do that in the family when
they read at home, when schools habits are reinforced.”
In that context, and looking at Violeta’s ideas of homework, we observed that
she also relates this kind of activities to many of the tasks with which she was
involved in school. Both the letter that she wrote to her teacher about the topic and
her drawing are very explicit about her ideas. Both are included in Figure 2.
We can observe that the child began the letter by saying that “she likes home-
work,” but “not on Monday and Wednesday,” and this idea is repeated many times.
The child seemed to know her family’s ideas about the topic and never refers to
negative aspects of homework, nor did she show any critical thinking in relation
to it. Finally, and this is one of the most interesting aspects for us, the letter is an
important tool that tells us about how adults organize activities for their children.
That is, many of these children do not have a free minute to do what they prefer.
They are overloaded with school or extracurricular programs, without any time to

Figure 2. The role of homework in Violeta’s everyday life.
involve themselves in activities chosen by themselves. However, we must point
out that it is difficult for us to know, on the basis of that letter, the significance
that children and adults assign to homework; it may even be that doing homework
is hard for both adults and children. They may in fact view all activities as good
things, evidence of their productive movements into the middle classes, especially
if we take into account that the school is situated in a working-class community.
We focus now on the first interaction between Violeta and her mother when
the child writes her text about the celebration of “Fruit Day” when the children
shared fruit and activities with children from another school. Figure 3 reproduces
the child’s composition. The child wrote the text by herself and then read it to her
mother. From that point on, their conversation only focused on physical, formal,
and normative aspects.
Conversation about the text included only a few verbal exchanges. While the
child was reading the text for her mother, she occasionally stopped, and her mother
would introduce some comments related to spelling rules, repetitions of words, and

Figure 3. Celebration of “Fruit Day.”
so on, for example: “Look Violeta, when you say something about the fruit mask
and you want to explain that it was yours, you open a bracket, you write ‘I made a
strawberry,’ close the bracket and put a colon, then you continue, two safety-pins,
two drawings, colon.”1 From our point of view, at that time mother and child
established an asymmetrical relationship, in which the decision-making process
was the responsibility of the adult. Meanwhile, the child adopted a very passive
role and did not consider the written text as a tool for communication or expression.
Guided for the Textbook: Using a Pedagogical Approach
We now focus on Violeta’s conversation with her father when they wrote a poem
about the same topic, taking as their starting point the child’s previous text. From

our own perspective, these relationships present a very different approach to the
text, an approach that can be characterized by several features. First was a pro-
gressive increase in their consciousness of the informative value of the written
text. In that way, participants need to assume that developing a text is much more
than merely applying certain grammatical rules; in such situations, the adult was
conscious that this kind of text has its own structure that forces him to differentiate
between oral and written language. Secondly, in this specific case, the relationship
between father and child was mediated and directed by the textbook.
But let us explore the conversation during the writing of the poem. The session
can be divided into two clearly differentiated parts. During the first, father and child
developed a shared representation of the text, in which the adult’s contributions
were clearly predominant; then, once they had developed this shared representation
of their final goal, they wrote the poem (Figure 4).
During the first part of the session, the differences between the father’s and
child’s representations of the task appear clearly. Violeta seems to have a preexist-
ing idea of what a poem ought to be like. We get the impression that she has just
two ideas that she brings home from school: the first one is that her text must be
written in rhyme, the second is that the topic or content of the poem should refer to
the “Fruit Day.” In contrast, her father’s ideas and goals are very different. Perhaps
because he does not know how to write a poem, or because he does not have a
stereotype about how he needs to proceed to write this kind of text, he seeks very
Figure 4. Violeta and her father write a poem.

strong support from the textbook. The poem was finally written according to the
steps outlined in the textbook. We now focus on some of the main parts of their
conversation.
Looking for a shared goal when writing the text
Father: ¡Ah! ¿es eso nuevo? A¡ Is this new?
Violeta: Le he puesto en el dı́a de la fruta y que una
fruta que rima eso es lo que iba poner, con
fruta
I put in Fruit Day and that one fruit that
rhymes with fruit, it was what I put in
Father: Pero si lo vas hacer libre, primero coges el
tema
But the first thing you need to do is to choose
the topic
Violeta: El dı́a de la fruta . . . The Fruit Day
Father: El dı́a de la fruta, venga, y primero ya has
visto que era, la primera frase para que
era . . .
The Fruit Day, OK. Come on, and first you
see what it was, the first sentence was to . . .
Violeta: Es como un resumen y, entonces pues tiene
que rimar
It is like a summary and then it needs to
rhyme
What we can see by reading this dialogue is that the child is worried about
rhyme, while her father is looking for the characteristics that the first verse needs
to have, according to the textbook. By looking at the session in greater depth, we
notice that father and child stay in touch in an asymmetrical way, in that the adult
wishes to introduce a specific strategy according to the textbook’s instructions.
This situation, as we will see, will introduce specific conflicts with the child’s
ideas. All those problems are clearly observed when both adult and child began to
write the first verse.
Father: La primera era para describir el personaje The first (line) was to describe the character
Violeta: Si, el dı́a de la fruta me comı́ una viruta Yes, the Fruit Day I ate a wood-shaving
Father: Mira en el libro cómo era . . . tienes que mi-
rarlo primero. Venga ve mirando eso y con
ese bolı́grafo no vas a escribir, escribe con
uno . . .
Look at the book, how it was . . . . First you
need to check it. Come on; you cannot write
with this pen, you need to write with one . . .
Violeta: ¿Dónde está . . . ? Where is it?
Father: ¿Estás mirando? mira primero como se hacı́a
venga
Are you looking? Check first what you need
to do, come on!
We see in the above dialogue that the child has generated the first verse of
the poem. She knows how to play with words. In contrast, her father wants to be
supported by the textbook, according to which, he considers necessary to look for
a main character. But how can a human character be the most important element
during the Fruit Day is what the child seems to be thinking. But from that moment
on we see that Violeta seems to be forced to accept her father’s ideas. At the same
time, we can see how difficult it is for both parent and child to adapt the teacher’s
instructions to the suggestions of the manual.

Violeta: Primero un verso de la presentación del pro-
tagonista
First a verse including the main character
presentation
Father: Claro, ya sabes la historia de que va OK, you know what the story is about
Violeta: O sea, que pongo, en el dı́a de la fruta, porque
aquı́ presentamos de lo que vamos a hablar
¿no? . . . una manzana que sea que pegue
con-uta, qué puede pegar ¿viruta?
OK, I put in the fruit day, because what we
present is about we will be speaking about;
is that OK? . . . an apple, something which
rhymes with “-uta.” What can rhyme with
“viruta?”
Father: Pero tú vas hablar de una manzana en es-
pecial, mira aquı́ en el cuadro, aquı́ hay
un ejemplo ¿ves? . . . Érase una abuela de
Sevilla o sea, elige una fruta . . . pero elige
una fruta ya . . . Tú que vas hacer algo de una
fruta? pues elige ya una fruta
But you need to speak about an specific ap-
ple, look here in the book, here is an example,
do you see it? Once upon a time a grand-
mother in Seville, or something, . . . choose
a fruit. Do you need to do something about
a fruit? Then choose the fruit.
Violeta’s father wishes to contribute and to orient the child’s search for the main
character, and this was made even more evident in the conflict between the two
models via which they were approaching the task.
Violeta: Voy hacerlo en el jardı́n de Chinales I will put (i.e., locate) it in the Chinales Gar-
dens
Father: Pero vamos a ver, ¿tu vas hablar de alguna
fruta? ¿de alguna fruta vas hablar?
But, let’s see, are you going to write about
some sort of fruit? What sort of fruit are you
going to talk about?
Violeta: Uhm . . . si Hum . . . yes
Father: Pues ya está, elige una fruta y lo haces con
esa fruta.
That’s all, you need to choose a fruit and you
do that
Violeta: Si, pero yo voy hablar de todo el tema OK, but I will be talking about all the topic
Father: De qué vas hablar de . . . You will be talking about what?
Violeta: Sobre todo, sobre cómo nos lo
pasamos . . . como resumen del dı́a de
la fruta.
Especially about how it was, . . . as a sum-
mary of the Fruit Day
Once again, we emphasize that the adult needs to be supported all the time by
the textbook, though even his child does not seem to understand his reasons very
well. But the girl, perhaps forced by the adult, adopted a different model for the
task, even very different from her previous ideas. From that point of view, what
the conversation shows us is that the child has a much more flexible perspective
than her father. From then on the second part of the session can be considered. The
child now knows how to follow her father by overcoming difficulties, even though
she did not listen to many other voices because she needed to work on her own
poem, playing with words and introducing each of the verses.
Violeta: Érase una manzana de Chinales . . . Once upon a time a Chinales’s apple
Father: Que Chinales no tiene que ser venga. Not, but Chinales is not
Violeta: Érase una manzana Once upon a time there was an apple

Father: Vas a hablar de manzanas, pues bueno, ya
sabes . . .
You will be talking about apples
Violeta: Érase una manzana verde y con . . . Once upon a time there was a green apple
with . . .
Violeta’s father insists once more on the textbook model. The relationships
between them are difficult but the child is showing an impressive capacity for
adaptation, and by playing with words she is finding the rhyme.
Father: Pues venga. OK, come on
Violeta: Érase una manzana, ahora, ¿qué más le
pongo? ahora le puedo poner, pues una man-
zana . . .
Once upon a time there was an apple, What
more can I add? Now I can put, . . . an ap-
ple . . .
Father: Pero como vas a poner otra, ponlo con un
poquito más de gracia, ¿no? la primera, la
presentación de la manzana.
But, how you will put another apple! You
need to make it a little more funny! OK? The
first thing is the apple’s introduction!
Violeta: Érase una manzanita . . . Once upon a time there was a little apple
Father: Vale, aquı́ viene, mira ¿cómo puedes hacer
los terminales? A ver mı́ralo, en-ajo, en-ito,
en-osa . . .
OK, here it is! How do you write the final
letters? Let see, check it, “ajo,” “ito”
Violeta: Érase una manzanita Once upon a time there was a little apple . . .
Father: Venga . . . Come on . . .
Violeta: Uhm, muy preciosa, o muy chiquitina Um, very nice, or very little.
Father: Puedes poner varios atributos, varias cual-
idades y, al final laúltima que rime con la
primera.
You can put several characteristics, several
qualities, and at the end the last one needs to
rhyme with the next one
Violeta: Verde y pequenita Green and little
They now begin the third and fourth verses, still following the textbook instruc-
tions. At this point, two main difficulties are interwoven: how to control the rhyme
and how to generate the topic. Both father and child are making progress, even
though they do it very slowly. The child is thinking aloud, although she did not
pay particular attention to her father, perhaps so that she can write her own poem.
Even so, in a very few moments, she tries to find her own way.
Violeta: Pero yo creo que tendrı́a que estar más
metido sobre el dı́a de la fruta que . . . bueno.
But I think it must be more closely related to
the Fruit Day . . . I think
Father: Pero éste es de una fruta, no tiene nada que
ver que un dı́a un nino se quiso comer.
But that one is nothing to do with 1 day a
child wants to eat it
Violeta: Verde, deliciosa y pequenita, que un nino se
la quiso comer . . . de un bocado sin tener.
Green,deliciousandverylittle,sothatachild
want to eat it . . . in a mouthful without hav-
ing
Father: A ver busca otra rima. Let’s see, look for another rhyme
Violeta: De un bocado a la vez, de un bocado a la vez,
pero no rima comer con la primera vez. Más
o menos.
From a mouthful at a time, but that doesn’t
rhyme with the first time. More or less.
Father: Sehizociertodı́aunvestidoparadeslumbrar
a su marido. Que un niño se quiso comer . . .
She made one day a dress to impress her hus-
band. That a child want to eat

Violeta: No, que un niño se quiso comer,
uhm . . . muy fuerte . . . quiso.
No, that a child wants to eat, hum . . . very
strong . . . want
Father: Para estar. To be
Violeta: No, para músculos tener. No, to have muscles
Father: Muy bien eso, ea, ya lo has descubierto, muy
bien, venga.
Very good, now you’ve got it, OK, come on
To summarize, the child seems to be conscious that the verse has its own rules,
but these are the motors that orient their creation and that orient her to be conscious
of the words and to play with them. The very small support provided by the adult
is making it difficult for this consciousness to develop.
Shared Recreation of the Text
Next, we focus on Ana, another girl in the same class. Her activities were inter-
esting for us for at least three reasons. First, her family, especially her mother,
demonstrates a high level of reflection about homework, which puts them outside
of any stereotypes that orient their activities; second, the level of reflection that
appeared when they expressed their opinions was also present during the collab-
oration of adult and child on school tasks. Finally, the child’s own ideas did not
completely match her parents’ opinions; while the girl associates homework with
rewards or punishments, her family considers that homework enables children to
go further than they do in their classroom.
But first let us look in more depth at family ideas regarding homework. They
agreed with the idea of homework, like most of the families participating in the
study, saying that “homework involves continuity with the school work and help
children to review some aspects that they do not have time to study there. At
the same time homework helps to develop study habits that they will need in the
future.” They expressed themselves in a very similar fashion when they gave us
a definition of homework, saying that, “homework is part of the school learning
process that amplifies it outside of school hours.” Perhaps the relationships that
Ana’s mother had established between homework and school learning explained
the strategies she said used when she helped her child finish her homework: “She
tries to make the child understand what she needs to do when she has to solve math
problems. These mostly try to focus the child on the main questions she needs to
answer or they explain some specific concept.”
When we asked Ana’s mother more specific questions about what the child
can learn in and outside of school, she established a clear difference between
mathematics and language. She associated her child’s reading and writing with
school learning: “We have to ask the child very often to read something aloud,
in order to detect any mistakes in her intonation or pauses, because she needs to
be a fluent reader. The same thing happen with writing, and for that reason we
check her writing tasks.” But the mother’s opinions were very different when she

was asked about mathematics, and she was conscious that the child can learn it
in everyday life: “Yes, she learns math outside the school; for example, when she
goes shopping in the neighborhood.”
We now explore the conversation of the mother and child when they were
collaborating on homework. Paraphrasing Wells (1999), we may say that they
went through the text by using a “recreative” and “epistemic approach.” What
this means is that they “reconstructed” the text as an interpretation of the world,
looking at it as a whole rather than merely focusing on specific words or formal
rules.
In general terms, three main differences can be established between this con-
versation and the previous one. In the first place, there were major modifications
in both the mother’s and child’s representations of the task on which both of them
were working; in that sense, Ana’s mother was sensitive to her child’s needs and
provided help in accordance with them, something that seems to be related to a
gradual transfer of the control function. Secondly, this convergent approach to their
representations of the task is not related to an equal degree of complexity in these;
for example, these representations may be related to the mother’s strategies for
helping the child, which naturally reflect much more analytically-based thinking
and a larger number of abstract concepts than are available to the child. Finally,
the conversation gives mother and child the opportunity to share a common rep-
resentation of their immediate worlds that is reflected in the way they approach
the situation, and which provides the mother with some useful information for
understanding what happened when Ana and the other children in her class went
to the park to celebrate “Fruit Day.”
The poem that mother and child wrote together is shown in Figure 5. We can
observe that the child is really careful with her spelling and punctuation; after each
two lines, she puts a period and begins the next with a capital letter. This format
matches the fact that mother and child generated these lines in pairs.
The session began when the child explained very briefly to her mother what the
task was about. Almost immediately, the first pair of verses was generated. Major
differences can be seen between this conversation and the previous one. During
this conversation, the adult helped the child to make explicit her own ideas without
imposing her own adult perspective.
Child: Pues con la con la historia que hicimos el dı́a
de la fruta, ea, pues un aleluya que los dos,
los versos rimen de dos en dos.
OK, using the story we wrote about the Fruit
Day we need to do an “alleluia” in a way that
verses rhyme in twos
Mother: Muy bien. Venga, vamos a empezar. OK, let’s go
Child: Vamos a ver el dı́a 17 de abril ¿no? pero con
qué pega abril una palabra que pegue con
abril, con abril ¿cuál es?
Let see “on April 17” is OK? But what is
a word that rhymes with April, with April,
what could that be?
Mother: Pues cualquiera que termine en -il. Any that ends in -il
Child: ¿En mil? In mil?

Figure 5. Ana and her mother write a poem.
Mother: En il. In -il
Child: ¿Il? el dı́a 17 diecisiete de abril tomamos
(. . . ) tomamos frutas a mil no pega.
Il? On April 17, we take . . . we take fruits at
a thousand (i.e., pesetas) . . . it doesn’t work

What it is interesting to observe in this dialogue is how the mother transforms
the meaning of the sentence suggested by the girl, and referring to the price of the
fruit, and helps the child play with words.
Mother: Tomamos frutas mil. We take a thousand fruits
Child: (dı́a) tomamos, tomamos. (Laughing) we take, we take
Mother: Venga, escrı́belo más deprisa. Come on, write faster
Child: Fru (. . . ) frutas ¿mil? Fru . . . thousand fruits?
Once she had got through the two first lines, they went on fast to the other ones.
From then on, although mother and child seemed to have different interests, both
of them were capable of converging. On the one hand, the child’s interests seemed
to be based on playing with words, while on the other hand, Ana’s mother would
bring some abstract questions into the conversation in order to organize the child’s
ideas, and only then did she try rhyming.
Child: Ahora intercambiando una fruta en una
gruta.
Now “exchanging a fruit in a grotto”
Mother: Mentira, porque en una gruta no se puede. You lie, because you didn’t go to a grotto
Child: (rı́e). (Laughing)
Mother: A una gruta no fuisteis, fuisteis al campo. You didn’t go to a grotto, you went to the
country
Child: A ver intercambiando fruta Let see, exchanging a fruit
Mother: ¿Dónde fuisteis? ¿Where did you go?
Child: A Chinales. To Chinales
Mother: Pues di “a Chinales fuimos” Then say “to Chinales we went”
Child: A Chinales fuimos “To Chinales we went”
Mother: Y a ver, qué puede rimar con fuimos. Let see, what can rhyme with “fuimos”
Child: A Chinales fuimos o yo qué sé¿comimos? A
Chinales fuimos
“To Chinales we went” or, I don’t know, ¿do
we eat? “To Chinales we went”
After that it was the adult who generated the first verse by taking up the child’s
suggestion, even right away:
Mother: Y fruta comimos. “And we eat fruit”
Child: ¿Y fruta comimos? Do we eat fruits?
Mother: Lo que pasa es que ya has dicho que comiste
fruta antes.
But what happens is that you have already
said that you ate fruit
Child: Pues entonces fuimos a Chinales para jugar
en los matorrales.
Then “we went to Chinales to play in the
bushes”
Mother: Bueno, venga. OK, come on!
Child: Con mayúscula ¿no? It is with capital letters?
Mother: Ś. Yes
Child: Fuimos a Chi-na-les y jugamos en los ma-
torrales.
“We went to Chinales and we played among
the bushes”
Mother: Vale. Good

From that point, Ana’s mother introduced several questions to organize her
child’s ideas. These questions were almost always much more abstract than the
child’s ideas, as we can observe in the following example:
Mother: A ver, ¿quién fuisteis? Let’s see, who went?
Child: Los del otro colegio y nosotros. Children from the other school and ourselves
Mother: A ver. ¿Cómo se llamaba el otro colegio? Let’s see, What was the name of the other
school?
Child: Pedro Barbudo. Pedro Barbudo
Mother: Y el vuestro Averroes a ver, pues di que fuis-
teis los dos colegios.
And yours is Averroes, then say that both you
and the other school went
Child: Dos colegios fuimos, dos colegios fuimos,
fuimos
Two schools went, two schools went,
went . . .
Mother: Y juntos comimos. And we ate together
Child: (rı́e) ¡Vale! Con mayúscula ¿no? después de
punto Dos colegios fuimos y juntos comimos
(Laughing) OK! With capitals, is it? after the
period and we ate together
Two interesting aspects can be noticed; first, that the adult gradually passed
control of the task to the child and, second, that the child was now generating the
verses much more actively than at the beginning of the session.
Mother: ¿Cómo de largo tiene que ser el aleluya? How long does the poem need to be?
Child: Eso me parece que da igual. I don’t think that it matters
Mother: Vale, pues venga di ahora las caracte´
r̃isticas
de la fruta.
OK, then say now what are the characteris-
tics of fruit
Child: Comer fruta es sano para cualquier nino
malo.
To eat fruit is healthy for all bad children
Mother: No, hombre para un nino malo y para un nino
bueno.
No dear, for both bad and good children
The fact that mother asked how long the poem needed to be can be interpreted
in a double sense; on the one hand, by considering that it is the child who gives the
answer, which thus, allows to her to make an important decision and on the other,
as an index of the importance for the mother of the teacher’s criteria, which are
transmitted to her by the child.
At this point, we wish to emphasize that when parents interact with their children
at home, working together on school tasks can provide them with important devices
that will be useful in their everyday life. From that perspective, Ana’s mother was
offeringherchildnotonlysupportinthewritingofapoem,butwasalsointroducing
the child to the use of a specific tool of her culture, the written word. Here we feel
that the important question for us is how we can work with teachers and families
to make this task easier than it is at present.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this work, we have considered families and schools as communities of practice
that are not only defined for people and activities but also for the relationships
that they establish with other communities. In this context, homework represents
a practice of particular interest for the exploration of interactions between these
two settings, particularly if we consider that communities of practice are regarded
both as essential conditions for knowledge construction and learning and as a main
support for their interpretation.
Inviewofthefactthatmeaningdepends,amongotheraspects,ontheparticipants’
goals, homework provides interesting situations in which various aims may con-
verge. That is, the same task from the child’s perspective, as proposed by the
teacher in the school context, is carried out at home in collaboration with father or
mother, who may be unaware of the teacher’s goals but are interested in helping
their child. For example, in our research, from the teacher’s perspective, the task
had the goal of making families aware of the importance of healthy feeding. How-
ever, other goals might co-exist, such as putting parents in touch with the content
of tasks that children learn in school; in this case, how to write a text. When the
task was brought home by the child, the adult’s goal may have been different,
e.g., to complete it as soon as possible, to do what the teacher wanted (or what
they believed she wanted), to make the task easier and more meaningful for their
children, etc. For us, the most important points were to explore how knowledge is
elaborated in interactive situations, how the meanings that the participants ascribe
to the situation is present in the process, and how goals are generated from those
meanings.
To deepen the meaning that families attribute to the school task, we analyzed
not only their own opinions about homework, but also their strategies when they
help their children. Those strategies acquire a particular sense if we consider that
learning possibilities in a community of practice are defined by its social structure,
more specifically by the relationships of power that regulate interpersonal ex-
changes. From that perspective, we explored interactive scripts (Gutiérrez, 1994)
as resources that members use to interpret the activity of others and to guide their
own participation. Those scripts are related to specific types of discourse. What
we have asked ourselves in the course of this work is to what extent does the fact
of maintaining some social interaction allow children to establish nexuses among
what they learn about how to write at home and in school. It seems to us that school
tasks acquire new meaning when children collaborate with parents at home. That
is to say, using different scripts in relation with the same text should enlarge the
range of meanings that learners attribute to the task.
Our analysis shows that several types of scripts seem to be influenced as much
as by what the parent considers may be a good text as by the role that she/he
plays when teaching. First, a mechanical approach is related to asymmetrical

relationships between adult and child; moreover, the adult’s speech includes a set
of instructions very similar to those given by the teachers in the classroom (Mercer,
1995). At the same time, adults are only worried about formal aspects of the text,
its physical characteristics, and so on; the conversation reveals that they did not
pay attention to any functional dimensions of the texts. Second, we refer to a
pedagogical approach considering those scripts in which a transmission model of
teaching and learning is directing the adult–child relationships; in specific cases,
revised in our research, the parent imposed a representation of the written text as
present in the textbook. Considering discourse processes in that situation, we also
discover the sequence “Initiation–answer–evaluation”; the one to which Cazden
(1988) referred. Finally, we consider a shared recreation of the text as a third
kind of script in which adult and child jointly modify their representation of the
task. At the same time, discourse is close to the one that is presented in everyday
life; considering dyads, we have observed that adults help children generate their
own topics and accept the child’s contribution (Blum-Kulka, 1997). Following
Bernstein, we might also speak of horizontal speech, dependent on the context;
for example, Ana’s mother was well aware of the activities that the girl had been
involved in, and she tried to ensure that their poetry was related to the reality of
the situation.
In conclusion, we ask to what extent our work helps to extend previous theories.
Three nuclei can be sighted in this context. First, we consider that our work may
make a contribution to the understanding of communities of practice in relation
to dynamic processes, allowing us to establish relationships between them. From
this perspective, homework becomes an example of how specific practices might
help in creating routes that allow participants in both families and school commu-
nities to end up sharing their goals. Second, this research explores the scripts that
organize the relationships of children and adults as they work in a school context
at home; keeping in mind the differences between these relationships, new studies
are needed to identify the conditions that contribute to generate particular ones.
Finally, we believe that this work has shown that the characteristics of speech in
formal educational contexts can also be present in the home. That is, scenarios
are not closed, but dynamic, and the discourse that is used in them depends not
only on the physical scenario, but also on the task that is being performed and
on the participants’ goals when they participate in socially and culturally defined
activities.
Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Jackie Baker-Sennet for her interesting
ideas, which emerged during our discussions on the homework topic. Thanks are
also due to Ruth Paradise, Cathy Angelillo, and anonymous reviewers for their
helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Preparation of this article
was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education (D.G.I.C.Y.T.)
and the University of Cordova.

NOTE
1. Mira Violeta, cuando dices lo de (. . . ), lo de la careta de fruta y tu quieres decir cual es la tuya,
abres un paréntesis y pones, y yo la hice de una fresa, cierras paréntesis y pones una coma y entonces
sigues, dos pinzas de la ropa coma, dos dibujos coma.
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